Broadcom CEO Hock Tan Compares AI Investors to Casino Gamblers
Broadcom president and CEO Hock Tan compared many AI investors to gamblers who have little idea what they are betting on. He spoke on Monday at the DBS Asia Future Forward Conference in Singapore, as reported by Bloomberg.
“A lot of investors have no clue what they are investing in,” Tan said. They set very extreme expectations only to find out that it’s almost like they are in a casino.
Tan shared the stage with Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, discussing where the next trillion dollars in AI will come from. The panel was moderated by DBS chief executive Tan Su Shan. Earlier in the conference, TikTok’s Shou Chew also spoke.
Tan noted that most companies have not yet found AI uses that pay off, as reported by The Business Times.
“People are just wasting money, spending tokens, trying to understand (AI),” he said. That’s what’s happening in enterprises today.
He compared it to a child at an arcade who spends $10 in ten minutes and learns nothing.
OpenAI’s annualised revenue of $50bn in September was considered substantial, yet Tan pointed out that the company is still losing money due to heavy training costs, indicating that the figure doesn't guarantee long-term profitability.
Capital as the Bottleneck for AI
Both CEOs agreed that money could become a bigger constraint on AI than chips, memory, or power, as reported by CNBC.
Hock Tan stated:
“What I think might be the biggest constraint is capital.”
He suggested that AI's future value lies with frontier model builders, not hardware suppliers. These builders will face the same financing challenges as today's infrastructure companies.
Lip-Bu Tan echoed this, noting that people want to see a return on their AI investments.
Hock Tan further stated that demand for computing infrastructure still outstrips supply, a situation he predicts will persist through 2029 or 2030. He expects wafer shortages to ease by 2028 or 2029. Lip-Bu Tan saw no significant slowdown in the next two to three years.
Broadcom is raising $60bn in debt to support Anthropic and other customers' AI chip and infrastructure needs.
Lip-Bu Tan also acknowledged the competitiveness of Chinese frontier models like DeepSeek, Kimi, and GLM, which he described as "good enough" and driving "very fast" adoption due to their lower token costs.